Mark Day 19
This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ Mark 7:6-7
Now we’ve come to the chapter on “pretending”. This chapter is full of people who are “pretending” to know and love God. Pretending doesn’t work. Pretenders worry about the outside, not the inside. It’s more about what they do than what they believe. They fill their lives with robes and rules to convince the rest that they are good. That’s what pretenders must do. But there is no joy, peace, or love in this kind of life. We don’t find love on the outside but on the inside. We find it by having a real and personal relationship with God. It is a relationship so real that we don’t have to fake it at all. When we find the love of God in our own hearts we can live in the love of God with our own lives. His love becomes our robe regardless of what we are wearing. Now rules may have some benefits on the outside such as the hygiene of washing our hands and cups before we eat. But it’s not rules that help on the inside, that requires a relationship with God personally. And we can’t live off the faith of other believers, we must believe ourselves. Pretenders do that; they pretend by hanging around people who don’t pretend. We can’t pretend to know this life, we must possess this life personally by believing in Jesus for ourselves and letting Him rule in our heart, personally.
From the Kitchen Table 